Today is the last sitting day of the Senate, and because our Senate changes over mid-year, no matter when the Senators were elected, those Senators whose terms are up finish today and the newly elected lot start next week. We put half the Senate up for renewal at a time. This time, though, something interesting is happening.
Today is the last day we’ll have sitting Democrats in the upper house, at least until next election. There were no new Democrat Senators elected this time. This is a party whose motto is “keep the bastards honest”. This is a party that really, truly is a democratic party: all decisions are made by ballot to all members of the party, not just the politicians. They’ve held the balance of power for a long time, first by themselves and more recently in tenuous dance with the Greens. Instead, the balance of power now goes to a Family First (read Christian Right) Senator and a South Australian anti-gambling campaigner.
crazyjane13 said a lot of what I wanted to say, but not all of it.
We’re losing Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja. I thought she was fantastic. When she was elected leader of the Democrats, I honestly thought I was looking at our first female Prime Minister. I told her that at the Reclaim The Night March in Sydney the October after she was elected.
She was feisty. She was our age — she was the youngest woman ever elected to Parliament. It was 1995 — she was 26, I was 24. She wore docs to Parliament. She made me think it was actually possible to change the world through an electoral process. She was smart and sassy and I really thought she had it in her to go the whole way. I never entirely understood what happened around her resignation from the leadership. I hated that backbiting and infighting had tainted this previously wonderful party.
And in its place rose the Greens. And with it Senator Kerry Nettle. And it’s her last day today too. Kerry Nettle was, if possible, more amazing than Stott-Despoja. She got up at protest rally after protest rally and said the things that needed to be said. She said things that no other politician seemed willing to say. She was a beacon for refugee rights and human rights. She was as grass-roots as it got. Hell, she friended me on Facebook — me and a million others, I’m sure.
There’s good news in this: July 1st will see the day that the right-wing Coalition party no longer has the majority in the government, and, with the help of those shifty folk mentioned earlier, we might see some of those promising bills passed; Senator Bob Brown is still in there, which means bills of his that have been kicking around for a while, like the Rights of the Terminally Ill Bill, aren’t just going to get knocked out; and Stott-Despoja hinted that this wasn’t her last gasp. I can’t wait to see where Nettle ends up.
But it definitely feels like the end of an era. Sad that these two fabulous women can’t move on into the grand new world that seems to be coming with a Rudd government and a Labor-Green Senate…